Month: June 2017

Kurt Kurasaki is an electronic music composer based in Northern California.While his preferred instruments are the vintage Buchla Music Easel and Buchla 200/200e system, he is versed in wide array of synthesizers and electronic composition techniques.Kurt’s professional associations include work with notable music companies such as Dave Smith Instruments, Rossum Electro-Music, and Propellerhead Software.Recently he has focused his efforts into producing and recording experimental works that incorporate modular synthesizers and prepared tape materials.

The piece presented here is a live recording at the “Modular On The Spot” event held during Moogfest on May 21, 2017 in Durham, North Carolina.The composition, titled Buchla Abstractions for Morphagene, is based on recordings created with Buchla synthesizers, but is performed on a Eurorack system comprised of Rossum Electro-Music, Make Noise, and Audio Damage Modules.

Stop Plate Techtonics is an all-hardware electronic music project in Los Angeles. Inspired by the sounds of 80’s and 90’s acid house, electro, techno, and breakbeat, SPT keeps the dance floor funky with original beats and bass-heavy synthesis.

The project’s philosophy places the live-performance of hardware-based synthesizers, drum machines, samplers, and effects at the forefront of its musical composition. This means that each track in this mix was recorded in a single take. Live performance mixes can be found on the Soundcloud page listed below.

SPT plays regularly in Los Angeles and San Diego with the Friends of Friends Network (#FOFN), Acid Varsity, and EMXLA, and they have opened for The Egyptian Lover, Juan Atkins, Neil Landstrumm, and Ramon Bostich’s Point Loma project.

Walker Farrell Is part of the Make Noise crew. When he was about 17 Walker composed a piano piece that was based around a chord he had “discovered”. This particular chord, when broken out and arpeggiated, had a feeling that was both longing and uplifting simultaneously, a never-ending cadence, an equal temperament Shepard scale. It turned out to be minor-flat-6, though the phrasing was as important as the content. In C it was spelled C, G, Gb, Eb from bottom to top. Two perfect fifths separated by a minor second. It’s also notable as the core of the Rachmaninoff Prelude in c# minor, which was a favorite of Walker’s at that time. Repeated, transposed, or reiterated in successively higher octaves, it had, for him, a sense of endless reaching. (It could also be spelled as an Ab Major 7th chord, but he always felt the C as the root.)

In this decade Walker has been musically more interested in structural grounding than in goal-oriented results. He makes music without specific results in mind, in two branches: one concerned with the creation of structures within which to improvise, and the other concerned with generative music (music that creates itself). “Green Fiber” is one of his proudest examples of the latter. It is realized on a modular synthesizer, and based on three ideas:

The notion that any given “state” of the system should follow from the previous state, and should lay the grounds for the next state.

The oxymoronic or perhaps redundant idea of processing an additive oscillator with a frequency-specific resonator; this leads to occasional periods of great intensity when particular frequencies are emphasized twice over.

The above-mentioned chord and the feelings it still inspires in him. The sense of “always ending and always beginning” seems appropriate for generative music that cannot have a larger structure imposed upon it.

The piece is played without any input from the performer. In other words the system is the performer. The recording was made without being monitored by a human.